#fqr2014

And so the Fat Quarterly London Quilting Retreat weekend is over for another year.  This was my favourite year so far and the highlights for me were:

The attendees - so many talented quilters all under one roof, so much inspiration, so much to see and talk about and, most of all, so nice to just sit and chat to quilters all day long.  And, as Jo Avery said to me, so many LOVELY people.

My students who joined me for Quilt Maths and Touchdraw for iPad.  As in every other year, I love the fact that I come out of my lessons having learned a whole load of new tricks and tips from them in the classes I'm teaching.  Thank you especially to Kelly for the tip of making backing fabric go further and Sonia for the tip on defining line length in Touchdraw!

The teachers - we really lucked out this year with a group of teachers who not only taught wonderful classes but who really joined in with the whole spirit of the retreat and just hung out with everyone all weekend.  An extra special mention has to go to those who joined us for the Saturday night quiz when they could have been home tucked up in bed!

Trash who was our social secretary for this year and made is her mission to smile, laugh, chat and entertain everyone during the whole weekend.  Generous with her time, laughs, hugs and brownies, she really created a wonderful atmosphere for us to work in.

All the sponsors who support the event, who provide goodies for the bags and who come to the Saturday night quilt market but especially Janome for providing us with fifty sewing machines for this year's retreat which enabled us to create this most dorky of photo opportunities as we carried the machines back out to the courier can at the end of the weekend.

Sandy, Brioni's husband, who took on the role of social media co-ordinator for the weekend and snapped and tweeted and posted and shared all weekend - go look for the hashtag #fqr2014 if you want to see more of what we did over the weekend.  He also took on a secondary - and perhaps more important role - of talking to the Jacks in their own language, rather than quiltspeak which the rest of us were using.

Mandy - my BFF who lives in my village, got me into quilting in the first place and who has supported me and looked after me for all three retreats now - I'd be lost without her there.  She hugs me when I get anxious and tells me it will all be fine.

Tacha and Brioni - as frantic as we always are during the whole weekend, I have so much fun working with these two all year round and especially during the retreat where we actually get to hang out together and chat for a whole weekend.  With all the stress of the many many things that go wrong and get difficult in the preparation for retreat, we had decided this would be our last.  But during retreat we loved it so much, we vowed to do it all again next year!

And last but by no means least, the Jacks (my son Jack and his mate Jack) who will next year have their own hashtag #jackquarterly. They carried machines upstairs, set machines up, packed them away at the end, changed sewing machine feet, set up ironing boards and irons, carried suitcases and boxes full of fabric, held up quilts on stage, flirted with all the cougars and generally ran around after us all weekend with smiles on their faces.

 

For those of you who were there this weekend, thank you so much for coming, we loved having you and you made the weekend such fun for us and a great reward for al the work and anxiety that goes on behind the scenes in the run-up.  I'm going to set up a linky party on the Fat Quarterly blog and we would really really love to hear all about the weekend from your perspective.  The post will also contain a link to an online survey and we'd love to hear any feedback you have so that we can make any changes needed for next year.  For those of you that didn't come, maybe next year?!